An Excellent Guy

On an island where the seriously screwy tends to be treated, well, seriously, even this situation has 3.6 million people scratching their heads.

Simply put, James Tuller, who had been chief of the New York City Police Department Transportation Bureau and who for four months had been acting as the designated chief of the Puerto Rico Police Department turned out…

…to be cheating on his taxes.

Or maybe not—who knows? But Tuller has been married since 1996, and yet for four years he filed as a single person. So that presented a bit of a challenge, since those pesky senators in charge of approving his nomination were insisting on seeing the tax returns. So what did Tuller do?

Well, he had a couple of strategies—the first of which was to stall. And though it’s true that we tend to move a bit more slowly than those goose-stepping Germans, stalling is a tactic that only works so long.

So the next thing to do was to run up to New York and amend his tax returns. But it turned out—curious, this—that there was a little difference between what he had to pay as a single person versus a married person. Oh, and there were penalties, as well. Nevertheless, he forked over $30,000 to the State of New York. (according to one report, he took five days off work to go up to New York to settle these trifles and get the silly paperwork…)

Did that make the senators happy? By no means. Intent on picking every nit, the senators demanded that Tuller pay the IRS as well. Then they’d see about the nomination—no promises.

So that led to the next problem, which was that Tuller didn’t have the dough, despite making close to 200,000 bucks a year. He was willing, though, to agree to a payment plan. But the senators still balked at assuring him of his nomination. So on Monday night, after 121 days on the job, this excellent though somewhat forgetful public servant made the decision: he would retire his name for consideration.

This has left even members of the governor’s own party wondering what in the world went wrong.  Part of it, of course, was that there was a scramble to find a police superintendent in the first place, since Tuller’s predecessor had up and left one day, all but flipping the bird at the governor as he rode to the airport. And it came at a rather poor time, since the senate was not in session, and it was Christmas.

Ah, Christmas—which in Puerto Rico generally begins the day after Thanksgiving Day and continues until at least the end of January—Fiestas de la Calle de San Sebastián—after the octavitas. So really, it’s only been a couple of months since any of us have had time to trouble ourselves about inessentials like appointing a police chief.

Well, it’s all a little troubling, since we also don’t have a secretary of justice, since that guy got into a little trouble when he went to the police station with his friend. His friend, you see, had been drinking at a party—well, that’s what you do at parties, isn’t it? And look, you gotta get home, don’t you? Does everybody have to be so unreasonable?

Right, so everything would have been fine if only the friend hadn’t pulled out his cell phone while driving—a crime in Puerto Rico. And of course, there had to be that nosy cop, who pulled the friend over, and noted the strong smell of alcohol.

So the papers had a field day with the Secretary of Justice, who had done what any friend would do: gone to the aid of his friend to the police headquarters, to ensure that everything was handled correctly. What harm could there be in that?

So it’s all a bit dampening, especially for the governor, who had to come out in today’s print version of El Nuevo Día as saying, “entiendo, por la información pública que ha surgido….” Or, “I understand, from the public information that has surfaced…” The Gov, apparently, is a regular guy like you or me—getting his news by reading the paper on the bus to work. See?

And all this comes at a rather unsettling time, since the United States Department of Justice…wait, let those fire-breathing liberals from the ACLU tell you about it:

A report released by the ACLU in June 2012 concludes that the Puerto Rico Police Department is plagued by a culture of unrestrained abuse and impunity. The PRPD – which, with over 17,000 officers, is the second-largest police department in the U.S – is charged with policing the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

In July 2013, the U.S. Justice Department entered into a legally binding consent decree with the Puerto Rican government that requires sweeping reforms to end the widespread police brutality on the island.

Well, to make sure that the police department complies with the “sweeping reforms,” Tuller appointed a retired US Army colonel, Michelle Hernández de Fraley, to oversee the whole process. And good luck to her, since the US Department of Justice determined that the police practiced discrimination, especially against blacks and Dominicans, were poorly trained, and didn’t investigate cases of domestic abuse. Oh, and that they used excessive force, especially in cases of peaceful protest.

Nor is that the only challenge she might face, if nominated and approved. Because we have more police officers than any place I have ever seen—but the monthly pay for our cops? It’s $2,600, or slightly over 30,000 dollars annually. On the island, that’s not bad—but consider, the other news of this morning: the police hauled in nearly two tons of cocaine in an interception off the north coast of Puerto Rico. In fact, in March alone, the police have pulled in nearly three tons of cocaine.

And what does that mean?

Well, we’re awash in drugs, and with the drugs comes the money, and with the money? Corruption—which is a distinct possibility. How much honesty does a base salary of $30,000 buy you?

The sad news is that the previous chief of police was—by all accounts—a very effective guy who had the support of the force, even as he was changing it. And the one who just left?

By all accounts an excellent guy…

Look, he just cheated on his taxes….

We've Come to Their Neighborhood

Right—time to eat crow.

I wrote yesterday something to the effect that it’s easier for gay people to come out now than it was in the 60’s and 70’s. But guess what? If the documentary Out in the Silence is correct, it’s actually much worse.

At least it was for CJ, the high school kid who was a jock on the football team until he came out as gay. Then, the bullying started, the phone calls threatening to burn down the house began coming in, the pushing and the shoving started taking place—incredibly—in front of teachers and school monitors.

CJ’s mother yanked him out of school, and did what any mother would do: she goes before the school board and protests. Their response? They didn’t even shrug their shoulders….

‘She’s gotta get a lawyer,’ I thought to myself yesterday, since I had only watched the first half of the documentary. So I was relieved when she turned to the ACLU; after a two-year struggle, anti-harassment seminars began in the high school.

So why is it so rough for gay kids today? Well, first of all, kids are coming out in high school, not in college or beyond. Second, what had been a taboo topic has become one on everyone’s lips. And third, the religious opposition has become much better organized.

It all started when the filmmaker Joe Wilson sent an announcement of his marriage to his male partner to The Derrick, his local newspaper in Oil City, Pennsylvania. The Derrick published the announcement—along with a picture—and then the letters began rolling in. One particularly painful comment—“it would have been better if you had never been born”—is enough to tell you the story.

That’s when CJ’s mother wrote, announcing that her son was being bullied, and wondering if he could help. So Wilson headed to Oil City, which had been the site of the first oil well in the States, and was now moldering away. His purpose, yes, was to look in on CJ, but also to see how the town in which he had grown up was dealing with LGBT issues.

It wasn’t pretty. Oil City was the home of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association (AFA), which is pretty much as you would imagine. Founded in 1977 as the National Foundation for Decency; headquarters in Tupelo, Mississippi; 180,00 paid subscribers; 3.3 million people receiving “action alerts.” Does that tell you the story? Oh, and here’s Wikipedia:

AFA has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as of November 2010 for the "propagation of known falsehoods" and the use of "demonizing propaganda" against LGBT people.

Think that’s extreme? Well, check out the clip below, entitled They’re Coming to Your Town; the “they” is less gay and lesbian than that dreaded “homosexual agenda.”

Who has the agenda? Is it the lesbian couple, who are renovating an old movie house as a neighborhood center? If so, their agenda is less pushing their homosexuality on people than it is about turning around a decaying city center, providing jobs, making money, improving the community. But Diane, the president of the state AFA, called around to local businesses, trying to arrange a boycott. At one point, one of the lesbians loses it, and comes out says, “Diane has done nothing for this city but stir up hate.”

There are victories: a Christian pastor who modifies his views; the father of a gay kid who won’t turn his back on his son, even though the father himself had beaten up gay people in his past.

But for all the victories, it’s the overwhelming negativity of Diane and the AFA that linger. Looking at her, you see not a woman filled with hate, but rather someone terrified.

And with good reason. If she feels that her world is threatened, well, isn’t she right? Yes, we have an agenda. We’re not going back in the closet, we’re not going to stop pressing for rights, we’re not going to accept abuse or hate anymore.

The decline of the traditional family? Is it perhaps time to suggest that there were some aspects of the traditional family that were less than ideal? For every family that mimicked Leave It to Beaver, wasn’t there one with sexual abuse, secrecy, drunkenness, lies, battered limbs?  

We are a threat—we who have been honest with ourselves, honest with others, and have fought against those who disagreed. Mostly, we’ve been a threat when we moved into communities, bought houses, started raising our families.

What’s more threatening than a new idea?

On the Edge

I can tell you that Lebanon is about the size of New Jersey, that 70% of the population is Moslem, and 30% are Arab Christians. Oh, and that the civil war lasted one and a half decades.

I can tell you this because a man in his fifties is reading from The World and Its People to a 14 year-old girl, who last year was struggling through state capitals. She’s Naia, the daughter of the café where I write, and she’s being home-schooled, which in this case means reading a lot of stuff in the book, and then getting quizzed on it. And so each morning I watch the pair; they seem to get on well.

In fact, the information that a civil war lasted three decades doesn’t quite begin to tell you the real story. That was best done by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it went something like this:

There was once a place where people of all kinds lived in peace: Jews, Christian and Moslem. But religion, though important, wasn’t all-important; being Lebanese was at least as important. And so people lived side by side in prosperity and peace, just as they had for generations, just as they always would.

What happened? I can’t remember and that may have been the point. For Taleb, the civil war illustrated how immensely fragile societies are, and how easily they can be torn apart.

I think about this because of two events taking place or that took place recently. The first was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, which lasted temporally four days and experientially as long as the civil war in Lebanon.

To say that the affair was boggled is to be polite. First of all, the mayor of the city decided to erect cyclone fences on several of the streets and proposed having checkpoints on the rest. Oh, and everybody—residents included—would have to go through metal detectors, be scanned by wands, and do what-not. To do all this, the mayor contracted a private company, at an undisclosed cost.

This immediately aroused the concern of the ACLU, who argued that the idea, and certainly the practice, violated the fourth amendment. It aroused my concern—I thought we’d have a stampede. So the ACLU met with the mayor and got nowhere. Then they took her to court, and got the court to rule that the barricades and checkpoints were indeed unconstitutional. So we went from having extreme security to having virtually none.

The police, you say?

The police in Puerto Rico are more decorative than functional. In fact, in an absent-minded moment, I once looked at a cop and thought, ‘I can’t believe they give those guys guns….’

So the police stood about and watched as a stream of people sauntered by, the children being urged by their parents to make maximal noise. This they did, the worst of which were the boat horns. Don’t let the size fool you: they can roar at up to 135 decibels.

That was the first problem. The second? The city had negotiated with the taxistas to provide—at a charge of five bucks per person—service from the convention center into the fiesta. There were also buses for free. So the predictable happened: nobody took the taxis and the wait for a bus could take an hour.

What follows isn’t so predictable: the taxistas became incensed, and decided to block off access on the major roads that lead to the old city.

You have to understand, Old San Juan is on a little island connected by a bridge to the mainland. Therefore, having an event of this magnitude is not so much flirting but cock-teasing disaster. My in-laws are well into their eighties, and the family was holding its breath that there would be no emergencies.

And so no one could get in to the fiesta, and there were massive traffic jams. So what did the city do? Call the cops and get the taxis towed?

Nope—they cancelled the bus service!

So the residents—those who hadn’t fled—of Old San Juan endured two days of maximal abuse, supervised by our chatting police, who did their best to ignore the crowd. The madness and the noise went on until at least three in the morning.

The café closed, since why stay open when nobody buys anything and your bathroom gets trashed? Because though the festival has great crafts and attracts decent folk during the day, at night it turns into a bacchanalia. The only thing that sells is beer.

Well, that was the first thing. The second thing? Well, the jury is out for Pablo Casellas, the son of a federal judge. The son is accused of killing his wife, and Daddy ducked under a police tape on the day of the murder.

It’s taken four months to get to this point, the principal problem being to find 12 people who didn’t think Pablo did it. The whole thing smelled from the beginning: an alleged robbery of a special pistol that later was found to have been the same type of gun that caused the victim’s death. Casellas alleged that the assailants jumped over the fence so lightly that they didn’t trample the grass, which was quite tall. Oh, and the bloodstains in Casellas’s car? Then there was the DNA….

It was all pretty clear who did it, but it almost came apart when the pathologist testified that—given her wounds—it had to be someone the victim knew, probably family. The defense seized, and petitioned for a mistrial. The judge said no.

He’ll be convicted, of course, and the verdict will be appealed.

Unlike the people who mobbed my city last weekend, Casellas had it all—money, power, status. And he was arrogant—he thought he could kill in cold blood and get away with it. He thought that everybody would believe his story and go away.

That, more than the pathetic hordes whose only fun is to come to a beautiful place and trash it, worries me. If Casellas really lived in a society where the rich can get away with murder….

…we’re screwed.

Two Cops, Two Communities

Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? If you want to sing in the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, at noon…well, just get a permit. That’s been the rule for 33 years, and it’s still the rule. So the new state capitol police chief is just trying to enforce the rules.

And the number four—as in four people together in the capitol rotunda constitute an unlawful assembly, and are subject to ticketing or arrest? Well, that’s just a convenient number to assure adequate police staffing, since for every four people he’ll need twelve cops.

And this isn’t about free speech or the First Amendment—it’s simply about following the rules and the procedures. He—David Erwin—doesn’t make the law; his job is to enforce it. And there are people complaining—they can’t work, they can’t hear the phones, they can’t do business.

But they wouldn’t listen to reason, would they? They had to keep gathering illegally, singing during lunch hour, refusing to vacate—so what choice did the police chief have? He put handcuffs on ‘em, and dragged them away.

And yes, he’s sorry that he called the protestors terrorists, though he didn’t, really. He actually said that some of them were terrorizing people, like the protestor who sang a song making reference to a policeman whose father had recently passed away. That’s pretty hard to take.

My dad was a journalist, which is why I include the clip below of David Erwin speaking to a Milwaukee TV anchor. And sitting quietly in his chair, far from the action, it all seemed reasonable. But then I remembered how it played out. Here is what happened to Damon Terrell, who wasn’t even participating but was simply observing:

The story for Terrell worked out well: in early September of this year, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said he wasn’t going to press charges against Terrell. But what about the thugs in uniform? Are they getting off free?

Yes and no. In the interview, Erwin states that if people don’t like the rules, go and change ‘em, or try to. And people did. A young assistant professor of medical physics, Michael Kissick, who had been protesting in the capitol, no longer felt it was safe to do so. But it bugged him to be silenced, and so he went to the ACLU. And in April of this year, the ACLU slapped a lawsuit in federal court against the Department of Administration, in charge of the state capitol, stating that requiring citizens to obtain a permit was limiting free speech under the First Amendment.

Here’s part of what Kissick said:

I stopped protesting inside the Capitol at that time because of police behavior. Officers whom I once trusted to explain how I could exercise my First Amendment rights without being cited or arrested suddenly turned on everyone who was protesting. Suddenly, the police wouldn’t answer my questions – they looked right through me, in fact, after a year and a half of very good relations. They were randomly citing peaceful protesters, claiming that they were violating rules and regulations that were constantly changing. They provided a phone number to call if we had questions, but nobody I know who called the number ever received a response. I lost trust in the police completely. Protesting inside the Capitol became unsafe for me.

Time for the backstory. One of the interesting facets of the Wisconsin protests of 2011 was the extraordinary relationship that the capitol police had with the protestors. Why? It came down to—as it curiously often does—one man, the leader and the chief of the Capitol Police. Also curiously, I wrote “leader” without thinking in the sentence above, briefly pondered whether to delete, and decided no. Because the chief of police at that time was a guy named Charles Tubbs; here’s the Wisconsin State Journal’s backstory on him.

The danger of getting in trouble with the law is something Tubbs, 57, saw firsthand growing up in a tough neighborhood in Beloit. Several of the children he grew up with are either incarcerated or dead from drugs or violence. His two older brothers ended up in jail, he said. Both were eventually freed but died as a result of violence more than a decade ago.

So Tubbs turned to religion and sports, went on to become a cop in the Beloit Police Department for 30 years. He made his way up to Deputy Chief of the department and resigned after 30 years; in 2008 Governor Jim Doyle named him chief of the Capitol Police.

And Tubbs had been influenced by a remarkable cop, David Couper, who had been the Chief of Police in Madison during the tumultuous protests in Madison during the Vietnam War. And what had Couper done?

Couper was all about dialogue, protecting free speech, getting close to people and creating relationships. All of a sudden, cops were going into crowds, talking to people, explaining the rules, asking for cooperation, and pledging to protect.

Tubbs, in turn, talked to union officials on February 12, 2011, the day after Wisconsin governor Scott Walker said he was gutting the state unions. And he kept up that level of communication all throughout the protests in the state capitol, in which tens of thousands of people were protesting. His goal? Zero arrests, and remarkably, he achieved it.

Not, according to Sue Riseling, the Chief of Police for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, without considerable difficulty. Riseling, in her book A View from the Interior, praises Tubbs for “incredible grace under pressure;” she also felt that he was too close to the unions. And there were other frictions as well among the top cops (Madison Police were also involved) involved in what was an explosive situation. How can it not have been? Riseling says it all when she writes: "What can the police do with such a divided community?" Riseling said, asking the question she's still considering.

Time for the passive voice: mistakes were made, tempers were lost, briefcases were slammed on desks….

My view? It was a triumph of policing. Other view? Tubbs didn’t understand his job, which was to keep order in the building.

And Tubbs, understandably, didn’t want to go through round two, which he knew was coming with the recall election. So he quit. Can you blame him?

Walker, of course, was less than heartbroken, though his spokeswoman murmured words of praise and gratitude for his efforts during a distinctly difficult time. And Walker lost no time in putting his guy, David Erwin. Here’s how he did it, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Gov. Scott Walker's administration rewarded the new hardline Capitol Police chief and his top deputy with double-digit pay raises earlier this year after moving the pair on paper to phantom jobs for two weeks and then back to their real posts.

Chief Dave Erwin — who has overseen a crackdown on Walker protesters at the statehouse — received an overall salary hike of 11.7%, to $111,067 a year, the same rate as his predecessor. That amounts to an $11,680 annual raise.

It is, according to Peter Fox, who was the employee relations secretary under Republican governor Tommy Thompson, legal; he also says he doesn’t like it.

Neither do I.

Well, as you saw in the video above, the Capitol Police did become “hardline.” But what happened to the federal lawsuit against them, filed by the ACLU on behalf of Michael Kissick? Read on:

The Department of Administration and the ACLU of Wisconsin Foundation have signed a settlement on a federal lawsuit involving permitting requirements for state Capitol protests. Under the settlement, announced Tuesday, groups like the Solidarity Sing Along will need to give notice, rather than obtain a permit, to gather at the Capitol. Nevertheless, the parties are still clashing over the interpretation, if not the terms, of the agreement.

The Department of Administration, the defendant in the suit, says the settlement recognizes that the state's permitting process is "constitutional."

"The permit process has been repeatedly upheld as constitutional by the courts, and today's settlement demonstrates ACLU's agreement with the process as well," said Mike Huebsch, secretary of the DOA, in a news release.

But Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, calls that claim "bizarre."

"It's pretty astonishing, because it's nowhere in the agreement," says Dupuis. "They tried to get it in the agreement and we said absolutely not."

At last we come to the point. Here’s what the Madison paper Isthmus had to say two days ago:

Capitol protesters are no longer just contesting the tickets they've received for participating in the Solidarity Sing Along. They're filing their own complaints against the Capitol Police officers who wrote the tickets.

On Tuesday, Bob Syring and Jerry McDonough filed some 15,000 complaints with the Capitol Police, alleging officers engaged in harassment and other misconduct in issuing about 250 citations to protesters between July 24, 2013, and Sept. 6.

"I hope this gives them pause to think what they did was wrong," says McDonough.

Syring says they are filing many complaints from third parties -- that is, complainants who did not necessarily witness the arrest but are "aware of what has gone on." 

 Yeah? Third party complaints from people who did not witness the arrest but are “aware of what has gone on?”

Let’s make it 15,001!

Somebody Always Gets Hurt

Well, we don’t know because it hasn’t been, and almost can’t be, studied. So it’s either three or four or eight times higher—the suicide rate for gay kids versus straight kids.

Correction—there have been studies; that’s where I get these pretty far apart statistics. But it’s hard to say. A sensitive, sweet kid gets bullied, doesn’t have anyone to talk to, feels alone and helpless. He takes Dad’s shotgun and blasts the back of his head away. OK—was he gay? Or a sensitive, sweet, straight kid?

The death certificate will have his age, parents’ names, cause and date of death. But the sexual orientation? Even if known, it won’t be there.

So it’s a fuzzy area. “The Suicide Prevention Resource Center,” says Wikipedia, “synthesized these studies and estimated that between 30 and 40% of LGBT youth, depending on age and sex groups, have attempted suicide.”

That’s a shocking figure, if true. And I wonder, is it easier for gay kids now than it was in my youth, forty years ago? Then, the topic of homosexuality was almost as off the map as it was in Victorian times. It was taboo, it wasn’t discussed, it was unseen and invisible. In a sense, it was easier to pass.

Though it’s just occurred to me—the word “fag” was very frequently in and out of the mouths of a lot of my classmates. Was it directed at me? I think not. But the message was clear—keep your wrists ramrod tight, don’t move your ass, books get carried at the hip, not the chest. Pass, and try not to think about it.

Because thinking about it lead to dread. My worst fear, in those days, was of my wedding day since—as we all were then—I was on a societal conveyer belt. I would graduate from college, find a nice girl, and marry. And I knew that the morning I woke up and faced having to get married would be the worst day of my life. How would I get through it, or more—would I get through it?

Today, I think it’s harder for gay kids. In high school, I was just a nerd, a cellist, not a jock but not gay. You know, just weird. Today, I think kids are more aware, if not any less cruel. There’s gay everywhere….

Well, I’m thinking all this because of Josué, a killer flutist and sensitive, insightful man. Whom I met when he was still driving around with a Bible in the back of his car—his parents were deeply religious and it would kill them, he assured me, if they knew. Don’t know if they ever did know, or to what extent they accepted, but he’s gone on, moved on, done well professionally and personally. And he’s speaking out, which I totally like, on Facebook.

It gives me no pleasure to announce that a Tennessee state senator—a guy by the name of Stacey Campfield (I’m tempted to note that that “Stacey” is just a bit, well, faggy, but I won’t. Anything to shore up the high moral ground!)

OK—where was I? Right, this guy—who claims that AIDS originated when one guy screwed a monkey (sorry about these digressions, but who could resist?)

Try again, Marc. State senator Stacey Campfield has proposed legislation that would require school officials to notify parents of any child who has identified him or herself as gay. Oh, or even questioned.

(Whew—third time’s the lucky one!)

Yeah?

Marc—“I think I might be gay…”

School nurse reaches for the phone.

Nurse—“Mrs. Newhouse?”

OK—what’s the rationale? Homosexuality is dangerous to a person, says Campfield. Implicit is the belief that, gotten in time, nipped in the bud, and treated with that expert technique of conversion / reversion / inquisition therapy, that young life might still be saved!

Those, of course, would be the caring parents. The uncaring parents?

Well, the ACLU article that Josué posted mentions several facts. Forty percent of homeless LGBT youths have been kicked out of their homes by their parents.

Something I feared, actually. Don’t think it would have happened, but it would have seared Jack’s heart. Look, who he ended up being wasn’t where he started—is it ever? When John lived “in sin” with Jeanne a year before their marriage, Jack’s world fell down. It was nothing religious. It was just that Jeanne “had no self-respect”—could any woman do such a thing and have?—and that wasn’t the woman for John. Franny found Jack crying one day at the bottom of the basement stairs. “I used to put a mattress down here when he was a baby so if Johnny fell, well, it would cushion the fall. But now there’s nothing I can do to protect him….”

The possibility of exposure, the fear of the police coming through the front door of the Pirate Ship—an old bar where the Overture Center now is—as you squiggled out the bathroom window…all of that is still going on for a lot of kids.

Two of whom, says the ACLU, were picked up by police when they were found in a car with condoms and beer. So the cops dragged them in for underage drinking, and chose to do a little corrective therapy by lecturing on the Bible. Oh, and telling the kids that they’d better go right home and fess up to their parents.

Remember the start of this post?

Right—one of the kids, Marcus Wayman, had another idea. He got the keys to his dad’s gun cabinet (and don’t get me started…) and blew his brains onto the wall behind him.

Well, the mom took the cops to court—good for her—and got a settlement for 100,000 bucks. So now we know the price of a gay youth! The ACLU says:

If even one LGBT teen in Tennessee dies as result of this shortsighted, mean-spirited, and quite possibly unconstitutional bill, his or her blood will be on Stacey Campfield’s hands.

Totally agree. In the study adduced by the ACLU, 46% of homeless LGBT run away because of family rejection and 43% are forced out because of family rejection. On the streets, these kids are vulnerable to everything from prostitution to AIDS to suicide.

For many of us, families are the cradle for violence and abuse. It’s the first law of family dynamics: somebody always gets hurt.